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IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Tuesday that service at his agency has gotten so bad that they are ignoring more than 60 percent of taxpayers’ phone calls during this tax season. Speaking at the National Press Club, Mr. Koskinen pleaded with more money, saying a budget boost would help them staff their overwhelmed customer service lines. He also said it would help reverse staffing cuts in their compliance division, where he said the government will lose $2 billion this year in money it would otherwise have been able to collect if it had better staffing. Congress has cut or held the agency’s

The United States and Cuba are set to mark an historic milestone next week with President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro poised to share the stage at the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Panama. It will be the first scheduled meeting between leaders of the two countries in nearly 60 years. In advance of the historic meeting, “Power Players” sat down with Josefina Vidal, the head diplomat representing Cuba in negotiations with the United States in the months following President Obama’s announcement in December that the U.S. would normalize relations with the Communist island. In what she described

Dr. Ben Carson, a likely 2016 presidential contender, tells Breitbart News that it is “absolutely vital” Americans stand up for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s new religious freedom law. Speaking about the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act—which has drawn fire from the left—Carson said the First Amendment is one of the basic pillars and a founding principle of the nation. “It is absolutely vital that we do all we can to allow Americans to practice their religious ways, while simultaneously ensuring that no one’s beliefs infringe upon those of others. We should also serve as champions of freedom of religion throughout

Negotiations toward a nuclear deal between Iran and the P+5 nations (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) will continue through June, according to reports from Lausanne, Switzerland on Tuesday. The announcement was made to satisfy the self-imposed deadline of March 31 for a provisional agreement, with “technical” details to be agreed by July 1. However, major differences appear to have been redefined as “technical” to keep talks going. The chief sticking point remains the question of what will happen to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. Iran had initially agreed to export the stockpile abroad, but

Fort Meade, Md. — Police say two cross-dressing men who crashed into a guarded entrance to the National Security Agency in a stolen car met the vehicle’s owner in Baltimore before heading to a hotel to “party.” Howard County police spokeswoman Mary Phelan says the SUV’s owner picked up the two men, dressed as women, in Baltimore and then headed to the Terrace Motel in Elkridge. Phelan says the vehicle owner told investigators they arrived at the hotel around 7:30 a.m. to “party.” Phelan says that after about an hour, while the SUV’s owner was in the bathroom, the men stole his

CHICAGO— A few years ago, violence on Chicago streets thrust a recently elected mayor into the national spotlight as shootouts in some of the city´s most troubled neighborhoods fueled nearly constant bloodshed. Rahm Emanuel spent nearly $200 million over two years to flood those streets with police working overtime. His police department also collected a trove of information about individual gang members and set up meetings between gang members and the parents of homicide victims to illustrate the high human cost of gunfire. Since then, the city´s overall violence has declined, but the number of slayings in some minority neighborhoods

The knock on the soon-to-be announced presidential candidacy of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio boils down to one word: Money. "But Mr. Rubio may struggle to raise money in the shadow of a onetime mentor, Mr. Bush," according to a story in today´s Wall Street Journal. "Jeb Bush’s success in rounding up GOP donors as he pursues a likely presidential run has created a big question for his fellow Floridian Marco Rubio: Will there be any money left for him?" asked WaPo´s Ed O´Keefe and Matea Gold earlier this month. "But the threat of Bush winning over donors who might otherwise gravitate to Rubio

AUSTIN, TEXAS—Right now, at least, Rick Perry seems to be getting nowhere. In fact, both of the ambitious Texan Republicans with designs on the White House—Perry, the former governor and Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative firebrand—are footnotes in the early jostling for the Republican nomination for president. But we are a full year from the early caucuses and primaries. In 2012, it did not matter that Rick Santorum won Iowa. In 2015, who even remembers? It would be a mistake to write Perry´s political epitaph just yet, despite his withdrawal from the 2012 race. He’s been lampooned of late as the cowboy

Harry Reid said he has no regrets for polarizing the Senate, attacking the Koch brothers, and falsely accusing Mitt Romney of not paying taxes. Republicans have criticized Reid, who recently announced that he would not seek re-election in 2016, for hostile tactics that soured the environment on Capitol Hill. The Senate minority leader dismissed claims that he is the problem with Washington and said he his proud of taking on the Koch brothers when no one else would. Reid appeared to take some joy of being a part of the Democrat machine that took down Romney in 2012. “Let him prove that he has

Ted Cruz thunders about what he calls a “fundamentally unserious” U.S. defense policy, but when he had a chance to weigh in during Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, he rarely showed up. Cruz, who announced last week he’s running for president, has the committee’s worst attendance record — by far. The Texas Republican attended just three of the panel’s 16 public hearings so far this year, according to a POLITICO review of transcripts from full committee hearings. The average committee member attended 13 of the 16 hearings, and Cruz is the only one of the panel’s 26 members with an

NEW YORK — It was a run-of-the-mill complaint — a smell of gas — with a troubling explanation: Someone had improperly tapped into a Manhattan building’s gas line, and it was leaking. The issue was quickly resolved. But seven months later, authorities suspect another round of gas-pipe tampering caused a fiery explosion at the same building, killing two people, injuring nearly two dozen and leveling three buildings in all. While officials caution that they aren’t certain of the cause of last week’s blast in New York’s East Village, it is highlighting a long-known problem with potentially deadly consequences: untrained schemers rigging up

During her senior year at Princeton University, First Lady Michelle Obama couldn’t imagine she would live to see the election of the nation’s first African American, let alone be married to him. “To say that during her Princeton years she could not envision an African American president is like saying that the sun rises and sets every day,” writes Northwestern University Professor Peter Slevin in his upcoming biography, Michelle Obama: A Life. At the time, the future First Lady was a girl from the South Side of Chicago, navigating the Ivy League world and its social intricacies while questioning the

Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) was a vocal critic both of President Obama’s executive-action opening to Cuba and his nuclear non-proliferation talks with Iran. In the midst of his loud opposition, he found himself suddenly indicted by a federal attorney on charges that had aired much earlier without consequence. I think the message was not that the administration was worried over appearances, but rather that it wished to remind all of Washington that it actually welcomed the appearance of not being worried over the idea of federal prosecutorial power being used for

Last year, Breitbart News reported that preview footage of EA’s then-unreleased first-person shooter Battlefield Hardline contained content that conflated the Tea Party movement with a group of racist survivalist enemies. However, with the release of Battlefield Hardline this month, it appears that all imagery and dialogue referencing the Tea Party has been removed from the final version of the game following our initial report. In the alpha footage of the game’s single-player campaign shown at the Gamescom trade show in August of 2014, a playthrough of a level which pitted the player character against a number of racist, extremist militia members contained

Offering suggestions that terrorism experts say range from troubling to goofy, a new jihadi e-book obtained over the weekend by The Tampa Tribune tells how Islamic sleeper cells can remain under the radar and attack when necessary. “How To Survive In The West: A Mujahid Guide (2015),” describes itself as “a guide for the Muslims who are living in a majority non Muslim land” that “will teach you how to be a secret Agent who lives a double life, something Muslims will have to do to survive in the coming years.” Written in English by an unnamed author, the e-book

He´s visited steel mills in Indiana and movie studios in California; an oil spill in in Louisiana and a landslide in Washington State; military bases from New Jersey to Texas; even Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. When President Barack Obama speaks at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah on Friday, he´ll have traveled to 49 states as president, nearly reaching his goal of stopping in every single one during his eight years in office. After this week, South Dakota will remain the only state unvisited by the commander-in-chief — though Obama´s aides say he´s gunning to reach all 50

The picture of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz’ troubled state of mind grows more complex with the revelation, reported by International Business Times, that investigators have discovered that Lubitz “trawled the dark side of the web visiting, among other things, sites containing gay porn, suicide themes and sexual perversions.” This sheds new light on a seemingly minor detail from early reports: other pilots teased Lubitz by calling him “Tomato Andy” because he worked as a flight attendant before becoming a pilot. According to IBT, this was not merely an insulting reference to the food and beverage duties of a flight

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence continued to defend the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act on Tuesday, slamming the way liberals and some in the national media have characterized the law. “I stand by this law, but I understand that they way that some on the left and frankly, some in the national media have mischaracterized this law over the last week might make it necessary for us to clarify the law through legislation,” the Republican governor said in an interview on “Fox and Friends” from Indianapolis.

One of the last surviving Doolittle Raiders who attacked Japan during a daring World War II mission has died, age 95. Lt. Col. Robert Hite died on Sunday at a nursing home in Nashville after a battle with Alzheimer´s disease. He was one of three remaining Doolittle Raiders. Hite was a co-pilot of a crew that flew one of the 16 B-25 bombers that raided Tokyo in April 1942. Led by Lieutenant Colonel James ´Jimmy´ Doolittle, the mission saw 80 airmen sent in bombers from a carrier at sea to attack military targets in Japan. Without enough fuel to reach

Under any other circumstances, this headline would be the equivalent to Breaking: Water Is Wet. For a decade or more, anyone who used e-mail for work usually had more than one mobile device with which to retrieve it, especially for those whose jobs required them to have constant access to their communications. Three weeks ago, though, Hillary Clinton claimed not to have done so, preferring “convenience” rather than carrying two devices to handle two different accounts as she would have had to do had she used an official State Department e-mail account: First, when I got to work as secretary

While reporting on Monday’s NBC Nightly News with the latest from the Iranian side of the international talks in Switzerland over their nuclear program, Ann Curry became yet another member of the liberal media in smearing U.S. conservatives by likening them to radical hardliners in Iran’s Islamic regime. After a report from chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell on the overall state of the talks as the Tuesday deadline approaches, interim anchor Lester Holt turned to Curry for “the latest on a tough situation facing Iranian negotiators having to convince hardliners in that country to go along with any deal.”

Rush Limbaugh took on the backlash to the controversial Indiana religious freedom law today and compared it to the liberal reaction to Ferguson and how people ran with “hands up, don’t shoot.” Limbaugh said that just like with the lie of “hands up, don’t shoot,” the liberal media is going wild about discrimination when really, he said, the law is just about saying “the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment has been affirmed.” He argued, “It’s purely emotional. It is driving people’s emotions and is creating almost a replica of the lie that ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ was.”

Dusseldorf, Germany The girlfriend of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz knew he had psychological issues but "did not know the extent of the problems," a European government official briefed on the investigation into the crash told CNN on Tuesday. The source said the girlfriend told investigators the couple were working through the issues together and "were optimistic" they could solve the problems. She was just as surprised as everyone else by what he did, the source says. According to the source, the girlfriend told investigators she knew Lubitz had been to see two doctors. The source says those doctors -- an eye doctor and

As House Republican leaders weigh whether to try to force former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hand over her personal email server, experts say the messages she deleted from it — or at least portions of them — can almost certainly be recovered. Half a dozen computer forensics experts interviewed by POLITICO said remnants of Clinton’s emails likely still exist on the server, although retrieving them could be time intensive and expensive. Clinton’s attorney David Kendall on Friday wrote Benghazi Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), declining the committee’s request for the server to be turned over to an independent

The overnight tryst began in Baltimore, with three men, two dressed as women. It continued at a motel on U.S. 1, and when one of the men woke up Monday morning, his two cross-dressing companions, and his Ford Escape, were gone. The dark-colored Escape was headed south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Its driver, in what authorities believe could have been a mistake, took a restricted exit leading to a security post at the sprawling campus of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md. An NSA statement said the driver ignored police commands to stop and instead accelerated toward a police vehicle

New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin hit the New Hampshire hustings for his Page 1 slot in Monday´s paper, "Bush and Walker Point G.O.P. to Contrary Paths." Martin made it clear where those paths lead: Either up to the sunny moderate climes of colorful diversity with Jeb Bush, or down a dispiritingly white conservative lockstep path with Wisconsin GovIn Martin´s condescending take, Jeb Bush is on a mission to tell hard truths to his party: That Republicans " must accept a changing country: that the path to the presidency will be found through appealing to voters who may not look